


These Vows We Make

by th_esaurus



Category: Hell or High Water (2016)
Genre: Domestic Violence, Implied/Referenced Underage Sex, Incest, M/M, POV Second Person, Self-Hatred
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-17
Updated: 2016-09-17
Packaged: 2018-08-15 13:40:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,699
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8058505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/th_esaurus/pseuds/th_esaurus
Summary: You thought about asking your brother to come to bed.You thought about it for a real long time.





	

You sat together on the low, creaking porch, passing a cigarette between your left hand and his right; you and your brother, Tanner. You had explained the job to him in fits and starts, still working out the fine details in your mind, and had not looked at him the whole while you were talking. Just squinted out at the lay of the ranch, the dry grass ebbing in the feeble wind, the sun turning its back on the land, tired of human foibles once and for all.

You'd fumbled to light your cigarette. You only smoked when Tanner was around, just like he only smoked when he was drunk or post-coital.

Your silence was not pensive. Tanner had said yes, immediately, incredulous laughter bubbling up from his throat, raspy and familiar. "Of course I'm in, you fucking kidding me?" He said, joyous, slapping you on the thigh. "This is the best idea you ever had."

"You sayin' that don't reassure me any," you muttered, but his smile was infectious. It always had been. Yours was somewhat subdued.

You did not like to show your teeth.

"Hell, you got anything stronger? If we're gonna celebrate, let's fuckin' celebrate," Tanner said, taking a long drag on the smoke, almost down to the filter. The ranch had not housed anything stronger than beer since your father passed on and Tanner had knocked the rusting padlock off his liquor cabinet with a sledgehammer from the barn; and you had not smoked weed since high school. Tanner, again, brought it home in a little paper bag, showed you how to roll, laughed at you when you coughed and then sat at the attic window smoking, quietly high, red around the eyes.

"I can drive out to the store," you said, shrugging.

"Fuck it," Tanner muttered. He settled into the deck chair, his thighs spread wide and his feet spread wider. He let his head tilt back against the wall of the ranch, his eyes closed. The land often transfixed you, but it held no sway over him. It had never belonged to Tanner: passing from your father to your mother to you.

Tanner had always been a visitor in his own home.

You got another cigarette going. And when the sun had vanished below the dusty horizon, you thought about asking your brother to come to bed.

You thought about it for a real long time.

Even under pressure, you'd be hard pressed to admit when it started. You had always been in love with Tanner. It had—

Not always been easy.

You remembered—

You remembered Tanner standing between you and your father, a brick wall your father tumbled too easily with the back of his hand. Once you were old enough for school, you were old enough to get beat, it seemed. All they seemed to teach you in them classes was back-talk, your father spat. "Yes, sir," you learnt to mumble.

"No, _sir_ ," Tanner barked, his face, even at twelve, a fierce little thing, ugly when he scowled and radiant when he smiled.

You remembered holding a bundle of ice in your sleeve to the welt under Tanner's left eye because he'd taught you that it would keep the swelling down. You did not have it in you at that age to ask why Tanner spoke back when he knew it would earn him a shiner; why Tanner did any of it. It was just the way of things.

Tanner planted himself like a tree between you and your father, and tried to hide you in his shade.

You had a growth spurt in your mid-teens, and got taller than your father, and Tanner stayed stocky and squat; and then it didn't matter which of you had the advantage because Tanner shot your father in the side of his head in the barn one autumn. Both of you towered over his corpse.

Tanner called you out to look, and told you how this was going to play out with Ma, with the cops. He could have lied to you too. But you'd have known. You always knew each other.

He held your hand tightly, sweaty, as you stood over the body of your father. You looked at his feet, how they splayed uncomfortably on the gritty barn floor; not at the glut of his brains shot up against the crates and wall. Tanner gripped your hand, and you could not specifically recall him doing it before, but he must have done. It was not a new sensation. His heart beating in your hot palm.

The crates in the barn were stacked two apiece, save for one lonesome straggler on the far end, under a raggedy hole in the barn roof. You remembered—

Sitting up on that crate with your legs apart and Tanner settled comfortably between them. Kissing open-mouthed, experimental. Tanner always murmured sweet nothings you couldn't decipher against your lips. He couldn't hold a tune but you loved that unintelligible hum. Tanner's palms were on your thighs, his pulse thumping there near your crotch, and you kept sliding your own hands down to his fly because you thought that's what people did, when they kissed boys.

"No," he said,"don't, shit, don't—" He batted your hands off, his voice thick with emotion like it was grit in his throat. You put your hands on top of his, held onto his wrists. He had hair-speckled arms, and the Texan sun had made his skin dry. He had taken to wearing his sleeves too long to keep from itching, but today he was shirtless, young and burning. You had wanted to kiss him from the moment he groaned that it was too damn hot in these fucking fields, and peeled off his damp shirt. Tied it round his waist.

You'd tugged on it, childish. "Tan," you murmured, thought it was just the two of you, the distant hills, and the starving cows out here in the wild. "Can we—you know—"

"Jesus H," Tanner muttered back, taking your hand. Pulling you the fifty yards across the dry grass to the old barn.

You remember the crate splintered into your jeans, and he brushed down the backs of your knees afterwards. After you finished kissing your brother. He made you scrub your mouth with the back of your hand, too, though you wanted his taste to linger.

You don't know how old either of you were. Whether your father was dead or alive. The feeling you had, kissing Tanner, was omnipresent. You had always known it, just hadn't known how to attach it to some physical catalyst until Tanner had put his mouth on yours and swore and apologised and kissed you again.

Maybe that had never happened. Maybe it happened every time.

You'd be hard pressed, as it was, to say.

You sighed, in the end. "You coming?"

"Sofa's fine," Tanner grumbled.

"Don't be stupid," you told him, and his head snapped to you, anger flushing along his ruddy cheeks.

"You're stupid," he spat, and it was true. It was foolish of you to woo him like this. The two of you grown men. Not kids anymore, who could feign ignorance or beg forgiveness.

"I know it," you said, and stubbed out the last of the cigarette on the porch, put your empty beer bottles back in the cooler. Tanner tossed his out into the dark field. You'd collect them up in the morning. Then you stood next to him, nudging his knee with your own until he wheeled his dozy gaze up to you, still fresh with annoyance.

He always melted for you quick enough.

"I'm gonna sleep on the sofa," he said again, stubborn.

"All right," you murmured, and leant down to kiss him. It was a long lean, and your back hated you for it. Tanner muttered something under your lips, disgruntled, and then opened up like a blue bonnet in spring. You could not stay like that long enough to properly kiss him, your back twingeing, never fully recovered from ranch work up until your twenties and bad posture from there on out. But it was enough to hook him.

When you were younger, he'd needled you for kisses. Lifted up his sheets and whispered, "Hey, Tobe—" until you laughed quietly and made a fuss of going to him, burrowing into his chest. His arms too warm and thick around you. You liked to make a game of how long you could stand each other's body heat, and when it was too much you'd strip bare and lie atop the bedcovers naked. Your arms brushing at the shoulder and elbow. His toes nudging against yours.

And then Tanner got older, and could not wait until you caught up.

You argued over it once, proper hollering. "What'd you think you gotta protect me from, huh Tan?" You had not come to blows, but it was close. Tanner raised his fist to you and jerked forward, but you held your ground. "Paw's dead, you seen to that, he ain't gonna climb up from hell and smite us."

Much later that night, you and Tanner fucked, rough and unhewn. He'd smoked a cigarette after and avoided your gaze and muttered that you deserved more.

Neither of you were raised to be honest, and neither of you knew how to react to it.

It caused problems, over the years. Long silences, stretched out like old gum, until one of you snapped.

The worst of it had been when you married Debbie.

Tanner was already distant and larcenous by the time you decided to bite the bullet and wed her. He'd blown hot and cold for a few years now. You always opened your arms and your mouth to him, but he didn't always offer. "Ain't kids now," he spat. "Things have repercussions."

It was a fine thing for him to say. He loved the thrill of a brush with the law, as long as it was on his own terms. Long as you weren't involved. Within six months of your marrying Debbie, he was interred long term, a ten year sentence he both laughed and retched over.

But you fell together plenty of times before that. Met as brothers, for beer and poker: his mouth was his tell and he covered it when you played, sipped from a bottle behind his cupped hand. You could read him regardless, but that didn't make you a good hand. You bet with pocket change and called it quits when he had a two inch stack of nickels.

Less often, you remembered, he'd pull up at the ranch in his beat up old Dodge, not come in and kiss Ma's cheek, and wait until you loped out onto the porch. "Be careful," Your mama always sighed, when you headed out with Tanner. Whether she meant with him or of him, you could never quite tell.

The two of you would check into a motel. It was a luxury you couldn't afford, and barely a luxury at that; cream sheets and curtains that might have once been white, a broken socket hanging from the wall. Limescale clogging the faucets so bad they only let out a drizzle. You always tried to keep as stoic as Tanner seemed to want, undressing without fuss, running your hand through your own hair instead of his, making sure you were both stroked hard before you got to anything like kissing.

But you did kiss, in the end. Every time.

Nobody knew you out here.

Even if anyone heard Tanner's breathy grunts or your quiet keen from the next room over; they wouldn't know.

It was in a place like this you told Tanner you were settling for Debbie. "Better had," you mumbled. "I owe it to her and my boy."

Tanner was slicking his cock with cheap lube at the time. His stroke faltered. He never wore a rubber to fuck you - "What'd the fuck I need that for?" He'd scoffed, "I ain't exactly gonna knock you up." - and did not allow himself the luxury of foreplay these days. You wondered if he'd used it all up in his teens. Back when all he wanted to do was touch you, put his mouth on you. Desperate with it.

By now he'd become methodical. An addict who gets no joy in the fix anymore.

You'd ended up spooning, Tanner's mouth open between the valley of your shoulder blades, still managing to gasp that your skin was soft and tan and you were his, his, his as he fucked steadily in. He did not love to fuck you on your side - reminded him of how much shorter he was - but it was good for you. Kept your hand loose around your dick so the thrust of his hips could rut you forward into your warm palm.

The AC was broken. You'd both fucked with as little exertion as you could.

"I guess we should quit it a while then," you said, very quietly, as you dressed after.

You'd wanted Tanner to fight. He'd fight anyone for you. Your father, and his crisp backhand. His own friends at high school, who wanted to laugh at Tanner's skinny little brother. Himself, his mind, his will; you'd seen him once slap his own cheek in the cracked bathroom mirror at the ranch, then laugh it off when he caught you looking.

But he'd never fight you.

"Sure," he'd shrugged, pulling a cigarette out of the box with his teeth. His jeans were still on the bed and you reached over for his lighter in the back pocket.

He smacked your hand away.

"I got it," your brother had snapped.

You'd married Debbie, and Tanner had gone to jail, and two years later Debbie filed for divorce.

Tanner would be in a jail a long while yet.

You thought a lot in the interim about making up that time.

So you sold him the bank job and took your brother to bed.

After your mother died, you took an axe to the little bedframes in the room you'd shared as kids, unsentimental, and used the wood to patch up the fence around the edge of the ranch. You bought an old double mattress for fifty dollars in a flea market and roped it to the roof of your car, hosed it down and left it in the yard to dry, and even in that night it seemed to collect the dust and bovine smell that imbued everything for miles around. It was thin and patchy, but it was long enough for your legs.

Wide enough for you and your brother both.

You remembered, very distantly, the first time Tanner told you to stop. Lying on his back, his palms digging into his eyes, a string of drum-like grunts pulled from his throat as you sucked his dick, shallow and shy. You'd done it before, and thought about it plenty more times than that.

You fucked up, you supposed. Tried too hard, slipped him in too deep. He'd told you to be quiet at the start. You weren't in the house alone.

The head of his dick hit the back of your throat and you couldn't. You couldn't take it all the way in. Jerked back, choking and gagging, a little bile rising in your mouth. You coughed it into your hand.

"Fuck," Tanner hissed, jumping up. He tucked his dick into his pants haphazardly and fled to the kitchen, fetched you a glass of water, hollered at your mama when she asked if Toby was okay. "He's fine, Ma, shut your trap—"

Held your shoulders as you sipped the water, got your coughing under control.

For a moment you'd thought it was funny. Smiled at him kind of coy, slipped your fingers under his waistband to try again.

"Jesus fuck," he swore. Stared at you like your head was screwed on backwards. "Don't you get it? Don't you fucking get it, Toby?"

He slept with his back to you that night, and you stayed awake until dawn trying to figure out what there was to get.

(Tanner had—

Never shied away from a fight in your name—

He'd never let anyone hurt you. Nobody at all.)

Things seemed calmer tonight. The last time you'd been with Tanner in any carnal sense was when he got out of jail, paid for you and your boys to come to out to the rodeo. Bought everyone chilli dogs, lone star flags, cans of Dr. Pepper, though he knew you hated the stuff. Debbie had declined to join you.

It was a good night. Humid and stilted and one cowboy'd had a bad fall, carried hurriedly out of the ring while his horse kept on bucking. But the boys enjoyed it, whooped at the show. Debbie picked them up, did not offer Tanner any congratulations on his hard-won freedom, and you drove Tanner home.

He nudged you to pull over in the parking lot of a dinky diner, all shut up for the night, lights off and moonshine glinting off the stacked chairs through the wide windows. There, he harriedly sucked your dick in the front seat of the car.

You had wondered if he'd be up to as much, after so long in jail—Tanner had said nothing of it, of course, but you heard stories. He was a violent man, but that didn't count for so much between violent men.

"Missed you," you managed to say, not looking at him.

"You missed this?" Tanner scoffed, incredulous, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

"I missed you," you said again. It was hard to say such things, and harder still to repeat them.

"We ain't kids—"

"I've heard it before," you sighed, canting your hips to zip up your fly. You had wanted him to come home with you that night. To curl up with you in bed like you used to. To kiss you in the barn, under the hole in the roof, where the stars twinkled through. To protect you.

From something other than himself.

He didn't, that time, but you were taking it slow tonight. There was a comfortable lethargy between the two of you that you couldn't ever remember revelling in before. Maybe the suicidal lunacy of the bank job had distracted Tanner's heady energy. Maybe the both of you were just lonesome.

Once you laid down on the low mattress, it was too much effort to get up again. You undressed half on top of each other, helped with buttons and belts. Once you were naked, you wanted him, badly. He had not become an attractive man, your brother, and he wore life boldly to make up for it treating him rough. But though you had striking eyes, not much else about you was handsome, even less so for your lack of effort. You were a pair.

Tanner hated to be boxed in so you lay side by side. Kissed his bristly jaw, nudged his arm and kissed his side, hard enough to feel his ribs, got one of his nipples between your fingers and smoothed over it, kissed there too, sucked somewhat. You told him fondly he was hairy as hell. "A real man," he scoffed, slapping your threadbare chest with the back of his hand. There was pleasure in his dozy smile. You wished you'd done this on all those cheap motel nights.

You liked the feel of his thick thighs under your hands, his chewed-short fingernails digging into your skin. It had been a while since you were as languid as this. A night, you remembered, when Ma was out of town dealing with the particulars of your father's shoddy will. You'd had the ranch to yourself.

Now, briefly, it was all yours. To sully however you wanted.

"You do it," Tanner grunted suddenly. His right hand lazy on your cock.

"We don't gotta—"

"Fuck off. C'mon, before I backpedal," he said, gruff, avoiding your eyes. "You know how?"

"Sure I know," you said, hoarse with want.

Tanner's grip tightened, barely noticeable. "How'd you know?" He said, low and dangerous, and he meant: who taught you? Who had you been with, other than him?

"No reason," you admitted, truthful, trying to kiss the jealousy out of his mouth. He blocked you with his forearm, for a moment. No avoiding his gaze now. "Just Debbie."

A wheeze of relief huffed out from his chest and Tanner smirked. "Oh, you been doin' her in the ass while I was locked up?"

"We tried it," you mumbled. "She didn't let me finish. I was thinkin' about you."

Tanner's hand stilled entirely, his stare sliding off you once more. It was hard for you to be romantic, and harder for him to let you. He had never told you exactly why, and in return, you'd never told him that you were in love with him.

"Well," he muttered at last. "I'm here, ain't I."

You fucked Tanner nice and slow. He rolled onto his belly at first, his arms braced between his cheek and the pillow, but you kissed the small of his back, slapped his ass and thighs lightly until he turned over to hit you in chagrin. You got his mouth again then, kissed him open-mouthed and full of brazen want. Put your hands on his jaw to keep him on his back. You wanted to see Tanner's face while you fucked into him, you wanted the truth of it. You had a deep, dull suspicion that he'd done this before, under far less pleasant circumstances.

You wanted him to regret not a single moment of this. Any of this, anything that had passed between you over the years.

So much time had slipped by while Tanner stewed.

"I'm gonna—" you murmured, steadying yourself between your brother's thighs.

" _Toby_ ," was all Tanner could say. All he ever needed to.

You took a sharp breath, and kissed him as you thrust in.

*

You remembered plenty, but you could not remember when all this started. Only that you'd always been in love with Tanner. Always, the two of you, in love with one another.


End file.
